Sea of Thieves stress test open to Xbox Insiders and those who played the closed beta

A scale test for Sea of Thieves is currently live for Xbox Insiders and those who had access to the closed beta.

Xbox Insiders who want to take part can go to the Insider Hub on the dashboard and install the Sea of Thieves Scale Test build.

The developers said the amount of people who turned up to play the closed beta made the team realize it needed to work on the back-end capabilities a bit more.

Some of the issues could be addressed “on the fly,” and others popped in new areas that needed work. The biggest bottleneck of data caused players to be unable to start Sea of Thieves or sell items at outposts.

This weekend’s scale test will be live until Sunday, February 2 at 2am PST, 5am EST, 10am BST.

The goal of this is to test the latest services work and to try and hit a higher number of concurrent players than ever seen before.

Players should be aware that stress tests are done in order to do just that: put pressure on the servers. The team will be throttling performance at certain times, and testing the game in different data centers around the world. It will also simulate deliberate outages.

So expect to see sessions being interrupted, issues joining the game at certain times, and problems using in-game shops.

If you’re one of those who enjoy trying to break a game’s servers, this is for you.

Another beta is planned closer to the launch of the game, and more information on the tester will be announced closer to launch.

Sea of Thieves is out March 20 on PC, and Xbox One.

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